‘But who wants to buy a suit every week?’ countered Roger Taylor. ‘What I can tell you is that, in the United States, the ordinary working guy takes it for granted that he’ll own a suit to go out dancing in on a Friday night with his wife, and often he owns a car too, as we’ll see when we get to the automobile exhibit outside. Maybe it takes a bit of organising to get the life he wants, a bit of care with the money, but isn’t that true everywhere in the world? The important thing is that the standard of living for ordinary Americans has risen to the level you see here, and goes on rising, year by year.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Fyodor, ‘the “ordinary” American with the “average” wage again. But how many people really earn these average wages? Isn’t it true that millions of American families survive on incomes much smaller than these – that three million families must somehow get by on only a thousand dollars a year, which is only twenty dollars per week? These are workers too, living in dreadful misery. So how can we trust your average? How can you expect us to believe that all these fine products are really familiar to ordinary American workers? If life is so good, Mr Taylor, why do American steel-workers go on strike every single year?’
‘Because they want their lives to be even better. Because they want to earn more.’
‘Maybe they get the average’, said the old man who’d wanted to see decadent toilet seats, ‘by adding together the capitalist’s wage and the worker’s, and then splitting them!’ He snickered.
‘Actually,’ said a bald man in square spectacles who had not said anything before, ‘it would depend on whether you were talking about the mean or the median.’ At this teacherly remark, no one spoke. ‘I have a question, if you will permit me. Mr Taylor, I wonder if you could say a little more about the way that prices are decided in the American economy?’
‘I’m not quite sure what you mean, sir.’
‘I mean, how is it that the pack of cigarettes costs’ – you could see him doing the sum in his head – ‘twenty-four cents? Why twenty-four cents and not twenty-three cents or twenty-five cents? How is this arrived at?’
Roger Taylor shook his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but that’s a question for an economist, not for a student of literature. I can’t help you there.’
‘Ah,’ said the bald man.
The guide looked at Galina. Any more? said his expression, clear as daylight. She pressed her lips together.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I think there’s enough space for us in the supermarket now,’ and he led off down the stairs. ‘Do you read Pushkin?’ Galina could hear the salad-spinner lady asking him as they descended.
The trouble was that she did believe it. Oh, not that all Americans were rich and happy, or that they could necessarily afford all the products that Roger Taylor said they could; but that somehow, for at least some people in America, a life was going on whose existence she had not suspected till now, in which it was possible to obtain things, things as covetably pretty and convenient as the little plastic beakers, without having to do anything to deserve them. Without having to make a plan. Without having to part with anything except banknotes. Just by going shopping. Roger Taylor talked about the money things cost as if that were the only consideration. She wrestled with the idea. She felt the way you do when you reach the bottom of a staircase one step before you’re expecting it, and jar your bones by trying to step into the solid floor with all the unbraked hurry of your descent. It seemed that life could be easier than she had imagined. But not, of course, for her. She was still living where it was necessary to pay for the life you wanted in boredom and embarrassment. Unfair, unfair, she thought.
They passed through the supermarket, Roger Taylor showing off packages of fruit jelly, frozen maize kernels, tinned soup, and dry grey nodules that turned into mashed potato if you added boiling water. Then they emerged onto the grass again and drank black lemonade from cups made of waxed paper. The sweet liquid made the old man burp. American cars were parked behind a circular fence, waist high. They looked just like the ones on screen in the dome had done, with a shark-like length to them and chrome ornaments at the front for teeth. All the men in the group including Fyodor went and leaned on the fence. ‘Ooh, baby,’ crooned Fyodor, and was immediately enfolded in a male conversation about the desirability of the different models on display, and the Soviet car make which came closest in terms of lip-licking appeal. (The Gaz factory’s Chaika, was the consensus.) He made a nominal effort to get Roger Taylor to agree that the vehicles represented bourgeois waste, but his heart wasn’t in it, you could tell. He had speeded up his talking one notch further still, and this time the effect was that he seemed to hold each sentence at arm’s length as he said it. ‘Surely-these-are-just-an-indulgence-in-a-country-where-thousands-of-children-go-to-bed-hungry.’ You-know-I-have-to-say-this. But the words were being said, and Fyodor could truthfully claim he had said them. She, on the other hand, was still silent. From time to time Roger Taylor looked at her in faint puzzlement.
‘Where can we buy these?’ asked the Mongol, without very much hope. ‘Will they be imported?’
‘So far as I know, there aren’t any plans to,’ said Roger Taylor. ‘You’d have to take that up with your own authorities.’
She knew that if she didn’t say something soon, she wouldn’t be able to at all. Her tongue was thickening up, or something. She didn’t feel even slightly eloquent.
Ahead of them, a kind of arcade jutted out, or perhaps more of a stretched-out bandstand, with another roof that looked as if it had grown. Pillars rose up and spread to join, like overlapping mushrooms. Inside, a low stage ran from left to right. Many tour groups were flowing in and coagulating into a crowd. Roger Taylor led his in, and they stood together at the back, half shaded by the roof, half by abig pine tree.
‘Now we come to the fashion show,’ he said. ‘A parade of modern American formal wear and casual wear, modelled for you by my colleagues.’
Loud music started up which made Fyodor smile, and a line of male and female guides danced out onto the stage, the men dressed in stripey sweaters, the women in check dresses with skirts which flew out into wide circles. The crowd applauded; but she scarcely looked. She was gazing at Roger Taylor, and scrabbling through the list of things she could say. It felt almost companionable to be standing there next to him. He spoke, the group asked questions, and everything went along smoothly, even Fyodor’s interventions. She found it hard to believe she could reach the quarrel she was supposed to be having with him. Unless she made it happen, the tour would soon end without her having done her job. Somehow she had to crack the surface of the situation. The bubble in her chest was back.
‘You don’t dance?’ Madam Salad-Spinner asked him.
‘I don’t dance?’ said Roger Taylor, pretending to be indignant. He clicked his tongue. ‘Ma’am, what an insult. I’m a fine dancer. It just isn’t my turn today.’
‘I’m sure you dance beautifully,’ said the woman, with a kind of motherly daring.
‘You make everything in America sound so good,’ Galina broke in, with a rush. ‘You make it sound as if the country is nothing but a garden full of roses. But this is not true, at all, is it? Because, because, in America there are terrible social problems. What, what about, the great, terrible evil of racial discrimination, which you must know very well yourself?’
Roger Taylor looked exhausted for an instant, and she guessed suddenly that he was used to taking a rest for a little time while his tour groups watched the fashion show. But he hid the weary expression behind a new smile, and replied:
‘If I gave anyone the impression that life in America was perfect, I apologise. Because, of course, it isn’t. We have our problems, like any country, we’ve inherited our fair share of tough problems from the past; and, like you say, one of our biggest problems has been the way that our coloured citizens and our white citizens get along together. We fought a whole civil war to end slavery, you know, at the same time your Tsar Alexander was ending serfdom he
re. But we make progress, you know. We’ve come a long way as a society, and we go on getting better …’
So smooth, still so smooth. What could she say that would make more of an impression?
‘Most important of all,’ he was saying, ‘we feel confident that our American system of values holds the key to defeating prejudice and injustice wherever it may be found. We believe –’
‘Why do you keep saying we?’ she interrupted. ‘Why do you keep talking as if you are included?’
‘I’m sorry?’ he said, giving her, for the first time, a look of real dislike. It was also an accusing look, as if to say, this game had rules, didn’t you know that, didn’t you notice that?
She couldn’t stop now. The words sounded horribly personal as they came out of her mouth, but this was the only way she could think of to combine the standard argument they’d been given against American racism with the awkward truth of Roger Taylor’s colour.
‘I mean,’ she ploughed on, ‘you keep saying “We Americans”, “we do this”, “we do that”. But white Americans don’t treat you as an equal, do they? You are from Virginia and Virginia is in the South of the United States, I think. So they won’t even let you drink the same water as them.’
His expression was now unreadable. He had set his jaw, and a line had appeared on each side of his mouth. He moved his head from side to side very slightly, like someone trying to find a clear path forward. The others in the group had started to turn and pay attention. They were looking at her. You could tell by the way they had hitched their shoulders that they were annoyed: maybe because she was being unpleasant to nice Mr Taylor, maybe because she was insisting on pouring politics in their ears in the middle of their one chance to watch the fashion parade.
‘I raise this point’, she offered, ‘because in the Soviet Union all nationalities –’
‘It’s true,’ he said, overriding her. ‘What you say. That’s true. At present. But that is a local law; it can change, and if you ask me, it will change. But the Declaration of Independence won’t change, and you know what that says? It says, “All men are created equal”.’
Part of her was pleased that he had lost his lightfooted poise, that he was now picking his words slowly and painfully, that she was managing to kick back at the world that had teased her with the little plastic beakers. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, another part wanted to say, aware that the public humiliation she was involving them both in meant something different to him, something she only sensed dimly. But it was too late for courtesies.
‘I don’t see what good it does that those words are on a piece of paper. In fact,’ she said, ‘in fact, those words are a lie, aren’t they, if they are contradicted by what really happens? Look,’ she said, pointing at the stage, ‘there’s another lie.’ The guides on the stage had stopped dancing, and were now acting out a wedding scene, to the sound of slow organ music. Two of the guides acting as wedding guests, a man and a woman, were also Negroes. ‘You show us black and white behaving like friends, yet in your own newspapers, this has been denounced as something disgusting, that Negroes and white people would be together at a wedding.’
‘A few Senators objected. As you see, they lost the argument, and the wedding scene is still in the show.’
‘In the show, yes, but what about in reality? Would this really happen? I don’t think so.’
‘Maybe not this year,’ said Roger Taylor, strain in his voice. ‘But ask again next year. Ask again in five years.’
‘And that’s good enough, for you, is it,’ she said, her own voice rising, ‘that in five years things may be a little bit better. Do you think that’s good enough? Do you think it’s all right to wait, and wait, and wait?’ She seemed to herself to be winning the argument, yet the bubble of panic was slipping free.
He breathed in and out through his nose, and stared at her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think that’s good enough. Tell me, what don’t you think is good enough in Russia?’
‘This is interesting music –’ began Fyodor loudly.
Galina ignored him. ‘We were talking aboutAmerica,’ she said. ‘America, not Russia. Where your people are treated without any dignity! My question, Mr Taylor, my question is, why have you betrayed your people by coming to Moscow to represent a country like that?’
Roger Taylor’s lips mouthed air, then dropped open, slack with shock, and nothing came out. Rules? said his disbelieving eyes. Weren’t there? Some? Any? She had blown a hole in his charm, all right; he couldn’t speak. She understood only in the barest theory why the question had done that to him, but seeing him speechless, voiceless, she was able to glimpse for a second how important charm might have been to him, as a covering, as a defence. She saw, hazily, how much it might have weighed with him to feel that he could count on possessing a thick skin of pleasing words, when he had judged it right to come and speak for a country which wasn’t certain, this year, that it would share a drinking glass with him. There was dreadful silence.
Then an angry muttering hum arose from the circle gathered around them, apparently generated by all of the group at once without any of them being singly responsible for it. She had taken part in this type of mass ventriloquism, in her time, attacking unpopular teachers back in high school. But she had never had it aimed at her. It was her they were all angry with now.
Roger Taylor blinked, and abruptly seemed to calm, as if there were some substantial comfort in finding it was just her he had to deal with, not the whole ring of pale Muscovite faces. He took a half-step back from her outstretched finger, and deliberately exhaled his caught breath. ‘I’m very glad’, he said, with a dot of careful acid on every word, ‘that my dignity means so much to you. In my opinion,’ he said, ‘I haven’t betrayed anyone. And I think my opinion is the one that counts, don’t you? Because the only way of telling that kind of thing is to look inside yourself, at your own conscience. And everybody has to do that. Everybody has to decide where to place their hopes, and what compromises are all right to make, and what compromises aren’t OK. After all,’ he said, ‘we all do make our compromises – don’t we?’
She was not a person who blushed. Now, she blushed.
‘But –’ she began.
‘Why don’t you leave the poor boy alone?’ hissed Madam Salad-Spinner.
‘Shhh!’ agreed several of the group, emboldened. Unfriendly eyes regarded her.
Roger Taylor left a beat of silence; his silence, now. ‘Why don’t we go on,’ he said, and he led the rest of the party away.
*
Fyodor left with them. A couple of minutes later, he darted back. She was still standing on the same spot. She had her hands over her face.
‘That didn’t go too well,’ Fyodor observed. ‘You shouldn’t take things so seriously. Look, stay here; you’re upset. I’ll do the rest.’
‘What will you tell them?’ she asked.
‘Don’t worry so much,’ he said. There was an expression she hadn’t seen before on his face. ‘We’ll work something out,’ he said.
Notes – I.3 Little Plastic Beakers, 1959
1 htNow remember,’ Khristolyubov went on: this one-eared Party official is fictional, but the campaign to guide the reaction of Soviet visitors to the American exhibition by sending in pairs of Komsomol hecklers was quite real. See Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997).
2 American girls in polkadotted knee-length dresses: for photographs of the American exhibition in Sokolniki Park, and of the Muscovite visitors to it, see Life Magazine, vol. 47 no. 6, 10 August 1959, pp. 28–35, with little plastic beakers on p. 31; for descriptions of the exhibits, see Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain; for a reading of the design politics of Buckminster Fuller’s dome, see Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, ‘Dome Days: Buckminster Fuller in the Cold War’ in Jenny Uglow and Francis Spufford, eds, Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), pp. 167–92; for press reactio
n in the US, see New York Times, vol. CVIII no. 37,072, 25 July 1959, pp. 1–4.
3 She had added a green leather belt bought at the flea market: that is to say, at one of the legal bazaars or car-boot sales (without car boots) where Soviet citizens could sell their possessions second-hand. You could dispose of bric-a-brac and you could put your own handicrafts up for sale, like paintings or carved wooden spoons, but you couldn’t manufacture anything without falling foul of Article 162 of the Criminal Code, dealing with ‘the exercise of forbidden professions’, or resell things bought from state stores, because that contravened Article 154, forbidding ‘speculation’. For the intricacies of the Soviet rules governing personal property, see P. Charles Hachten, ‘Property Relations and the Economic Organization of Soviet Russia, 1941 to 1948: Volume One’, PhD thesis, University of Chicago 2005.
4 On all seven screens, the night sky bloomed: for descriptions of Charles and Ray Eames’s deliberately overwhelming audio-visual presentation for the exhibition, and stills, see Beatriz Colomina, ‘Information obsession: the Eameses’ multiscreen architecture’, The Journal of Architecture vol. 6 (Autumn 2001), pp. 205–23, and Craig D’Ooge, ‘“Kazam!” Major Exhibition of the Work of American Designers Charles and Ray Eames Opens’, Library of Congress Information Bulletin, May 1999.
5 The fact that Roger Taylor, unexpectedly, was a Negro: though Roger Taylor himself is an invention, there were a small number of African-Americans among the Russian-language students recruited to be exhibition guides, a controversial decision back in the US, and a source of exactly the kind of difficulty represented here to Komsomol hecklers equipped with talking-points about American racism. See Hixson, Parting the Curtain.
6 Is this the national exhibition of a powerful and important country: Galina and Fyodor’s objections during the tour are modelled on contemporary Soviet press reaction, as recorded in Current Digest of the Soviet Press (Ann Arbor MI: Joint Committee on Slavic Studies), vol. XI no. 30, pp. 3–4, 7–12; vol. XI no. 31, pp. 10–13.
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